| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | BY (“buy”) CHOICE – “on the phone” is your homophone indicator. |
| 12 | NO MAN IS AN ISLAND – I think I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this quote in a crossword. “Douglas” is the capital of the Isle of Man. |
| 15 | A,VERA,G in ONE |
| 16 | RED (“read”),MULL,ET |
| 21 | EG<,(OUR CHEERY CAFF)* |
| 26 | C(heste)R,O,ELM<,CH – best clue of the puzzle. Lots of cryptic elements, all handled very smoothly in surface reading. It was a new word to me but easy to get from the wordplay. Explained here. |
| Down | |
| 2 | CHAR,MER(e) |
| 3 | G in ORAN |
| 7 | AGA SAGA – the last one to go and for a while I thought I wasn’t going to be to finish. I figured that “upside-down” indicated a palindrome but I just couldn’t think of a book that would fit. |
| 8 | (DENISE I)* – SINE DIE is one of those Latin phrases that I’ve never bothered to look up the meaning of. That said, it was a fairly easy anagram so I was reasonably confident it was right. |
| 14 | PLUS,F,OURS |
| 19 | ON in CYCLE |
| 22 | hidden in “TerritoriAL ARMy” |